Dylan Emerson

Dr. Hirschfeld
MGMT3900 Sec. 003
7 December 2020
Inductive Thinking
As the world grows more advanced, it is apparent that people have begun to become
more specialized to compensate for the complexities of these advancements. The book Range:
Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World makes an observation in the beginning of the
book about how oncologists, or doctors that specialize in the prevention and treatment of cancer,
have begun to specialize in specific organs rather than cancer as a whole; this trend of
specialization seemingly advances each year. But, even with these evergrowing advancements
and, subsequently, specializations, there has been a subtle trend of generalist individuals that are
capable of reaching a higher level of success than their specialist counterparts. Why they are
successful can be derived from a number of things, but what is apparent is that these individuals
are much more capable of thinking outside of the box and not being restricted by their
specializations.
David Epstein wrote a book titled Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized
World, where Epstein makes a stance against overspecialization by observing the current climate
of the workforce and how one can become more successful in the career while maintaining an
opportunity to fall back on other careers. The title itself is Epstein’s stance against
overspecialization, indicating that those with a broader skill set are more likely to succeed than
those who focus all of their time and energy into one field. For example, Chapter 8 in the book is
entirely about “the outsider advantage.” Simply put, the outsider advantage is the advantage
someone has who is not specialized in a specialized environment. Epstein recounts a problem
NASA ran into where they were unable to predict solar particle storms, “but after three decades
of being stuck, there was nothing to lose; NASA posted through InnoCentive in 2009.
Within six months, Bruce Cragin...solved the challenge using radio waves picked up by
telescopes” (Epstein, 157). In this situation, NASA was unable to solve a problem for thirty years
that an outsider solved in six months. Cragin attributed this success to his ability to solve
problems with practical solutions. In this scenario, Cragin had the outsider advantage because he
was unfamiliar with NASA’s methodology and he was not a hyperspecialized rocket scientist.
With this in mind, it is apparent that Cragin possessed a specific creativity that the
hyperspecialized NASA scientists lacked.
When one thinks about expertise, it is often correlated with a specific field. One can be an
expert mathematician, capable of solving the most complex formulas, or an expert in linguistics
with the ability to identify how language was derived. Both of these fields require some degree
of expertise to succeed, yet it is unlikely one will ever discover an individual who is an expert in
both mathematics and linguistics at the same time. It is impossible to be an all-purpose expert.
Expertise being domain specific seems obvious when it is broken down, but a more subtle
characteristic that is domain specific is creativity. John Baer analyzes domain-specific creativity
in his article The Importance of Domain-Specific Expertise in Creativity. On page 169 of his
article, Baer mentions how “to improve one’s creative-thinking skills across many domains, one
needs to work on and strengthen those skills in many domains.” In this context, creativity and
expertise go hand in hand in that it takes time to work on and strengthen skills in a domain to
become an expert or creative in that domain. Thinking back to the NASA scenario, they lacked
the domain-specific creativity Cragin possessed from his prior experience with Sprint. As an
engineer that worked for Sprint, Cragin had a lot of experience with radio waves, where NASA
probably had not considered radio waves to solve their problem at hand because they had more
domain-specific expertise in the physics of getting things into space. This further proves the idea
of Epstein’s book that individuals with a broader skill set triumph over specialized individuals
because their wide domain-specific expertise and creativity allows them to solve complex
problems that are too challenging for narrow domain-specific experts.
With all of this talk of the skills NASA lacked because of their domain-specific expertise,
perhaps it would be beneficial to analyze what skills are important in the context of a field of
work and why those skills are important for a generalist. It is important to have a broad skill set
because a broad skill set presents an opportunity for change should that situation arise. Alvin
Vista researched this idea of the value of skills and how skills affected one’s transferability from
one career to another in his article “Data-Driven Identification of Skills for the Future: 21st-
Century Skills for the 21st-Century Workforce.” During his research, he discovered that not only
do certain occupations value certain skills over others, such as engineering favoring problem
sensitivity and critical thinking significantly more than visualization (Vista, 5), but some skills
even have a transferability metric that “would enable anyone with an occupation in this group to
transition to another occupation with the least ‘transition cost’ as well have as the most options
for target occupations” (Vista, 7). If an individual possesses highly-sought skills in a variety of
fields, they are more likely to be able to transfer between fields with a higher degree of success
than their peers who are more narrowly focused. Epstein mentions this in his book in Chapter 10:
Fooled by Expertise by comparing these two types of individuals to foxes and hedgehogs.
Hedgehogs are narrow-focused individuals that excel greatly in one discipline, while foxes are
individuals who range outside a single discipline (Epstein, 196).
In summary, Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
challenges the concept of overspecialization. In a world where everything is advancing quickly
and becoming increasingly complex, hyperspecialization may appear to be beneficial. Upon
further inspection, specialists actually rely on generalists to solve complex problems they are
unable to solve due to the different skills and perspectives generalists possess. Generalists
triumph in a specialized world because they possess the skills and creativity to navigate through
a specialized world without getting trapped in a hyperspecialized hole.

References
Baer, John. “The Importance of Domain-Specific Expertise in Creativity.” Roeper Review, vol.
37, no. 3, 2015, pp. 165–178.
Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Riverhead Books,
2019.
Vista, Alvin. “Data-Driven Identification of Skills for the Future: 21st-Century Skills for the
21st-Century Workforce.” SAGE Open, vol. 10, no. 2, 2020, pp. 1-10.